Pharaonic or Arabic?
By Naguib Mahfouz
The perennial question of the present-day Egyptian's identity -- whether it is Pharaonic or Arabic -- is for me somewhat pointless. It is true that our roots are in Ancient Egypt, but we are Arabs by virtue of the region in which we live, the language we speak and the culture we have adopted. It is also the case that, because of our vital environment, we share our future with other Arabs. We may be Pharaonic in origin, but this should not contradict the fact that we are also, and to a greater extent, Arabs.
As for concern with ethnicity, that sounds to me like a Nazi pursuit. We all know that there is no such thing as a pure ethnicity, and in Egypt especially it would be impossible to determine the ethnicity of present-day Egyptians with any degree of precision. Any national people is the sum total of the many ethnicities that settled in that nation. Even the Ancient Egyptians had no unified ethnicity, but were made up of Palestinian, Libyan, Negro and Mediterranean stock. So I feel the question of whether we are Arabs or Pharaohs is somewhat forced -- what, in the end, does it matter? The one aspect of our identity does not contradict the other, and in the end we are who we are.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
